Thanks for developing this program. I'm a first time caller. (smile) Just joined the forum.
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I use iTunes for Podcasts and downloading of audiobooks (almost always in MP3 format). In fact something like 80% of my "music" in iTunes is actually spoken word. (Much of it downloaded from Podiobooks.com)
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However, my Powerbook with the 80 GB drive fills up and I find I need to dump books off onto an external firewire drive. I couldn't just click on a chapter because that would load it back into iTunes with the space lost and having to go back and delete each chapter as I listened to it. So I looked around for a player which could read MP3s off my external firewire drive. Play does this quite nicely and thanks.
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As the Subject line hints, one of the features I wish Play had is the ability to play files back at higher speeds for listening especially to books and spoken word podcasts. One of the things I did before I found Play was to load the individual files into Amadeus Pro and then use the speed control there to bump up the reading to 50% faster without changing the pitch. It changes the speed without changing the pitch because it drops out samples of sound in playback -- at least I think that is how it works.
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So, if you drop one sample out of 10 you get something like an 11% speed increase. Something along that line. It would be really neat if you could implement this feature. Not too difficult to program in, I'm guessing. There are very few MP3 players with this built in, and they are not Mac compatible. I've even gone the route of loading the books into Amadeus Pro and then saving them as Bookmarkable MP4-AAC so they become recognized as Audiobooks and can play faster with the settings on the iPod. It takes so long to do that however.
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So again in summary this quickly implemented feature would ignore every 1 out of 10 samples or 1 out of 9 samples and so on, up to say about 160%. This would really improve the enjoyment of Play. You could even make it a bit intelligent and if the sample was a silence below a certain byte level (like between words), skip 2 samples in a row, then back to 10 samples. If the same silence between a word then skip 2 samples in a row. And so on like that.
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ByronW